Collini, Stefan. "A Life in Politics: NEW LEFT at 50." GUARDIAN Februar 13, 2010.

New Left Review at 50: no balloons, of course, and definitely no party games. The very idea of "celebration" smacks of consumerist pseudo-optimism. Mere chronology is, after all, an untheorised concept. We should see it as not so much an ­anniversary, more an over-determined conjuncture. It is hard not to be intimidated by New Left Review. At times, the journal can seem like an elaborate contrivance for making us feel inadequate. One's relation to it conjugates as an irregular verb: I wish I knew more about industrialisation in China; you ought to have a better grasp of Brenner's analysis of global turbulence; he, she, or it needs to understand the significance of community-based activism in Latin America. For many Guardian readers (and others), the journal functions like a kind of older brother whom we look up to – more serious, better informed, better travelled, stronger, irreplaceable. Well, maybe a tiny bit solemn at times (we could draw lots for who gets the job of telling Perry Anderson to lighten up), and perhaps when we were out of touch for longish stretches, life seemed a bit easier. But then we meet up and it's a case of respect at first sight, all over again. It hasn't always been like this: even older brothers had rocky periods in their youth – misguided enthusiasms, failed relationships, moody withdrawals. Some readers may remember times when NLR seemed hell-bent on sectarian purism, theoretical slavishness and a wilful opacity. It has been through several changes of identity in the past 50 years, and memories of some of these earlier phases may hamper the efforts that it has made recently to reach out to a more diverse readership. But there is a lot in that history to be proud of. The journal has, in its own unbending fashion, registered and responded to huge changes in the world during this half-century, and in doing so has made a stock of ideas available well beyond the ranks of those who may at any point have shared its particular form, or forms, of Marxism (an allegiance that has itself modulated, perhaps even attenuated somewhat, over the decades). Some things about the journal, however, don't change. What other publication would take out a full-page advertisement in a national newspaper announcing its "quinquagenary issue"? NLR has been accused of many things, but never of populist dumbing-down. The biography of the review cannot be reduced to a formula: its experience so far has been too rich and too contradictory. But it would be fair to say that a journal that began life hoping to animate and express organised popular movements on the left soon became a more emphatically theoretical enterprise, albeit with certain Leninist or Trotskyist longings held in reserve. Then, in the 1980s, it began to interpret its intellectual task in more expansive terms, and since 2000 it has been self-consciously a "journal of ideas" – on the left, to be sure, but distant from radical movements in the present or any worked-out political blueprint for the future. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/13/new-left-review-stefan-collini.

Furedi, Frank. "Turning Peer Review into Modern-Day Holy Scripture." SPIKED Februry 23, 2010.

Suddenly, the esoteric system of peer review has hit the headlines. The Lancet, a leading British medical journal, has acknowledged that it made a serious error in publishing a study suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and autism and bowel disease. Earlier this month, a group of leading stem cell researchers wrote an open letter pointing out the systematic abuse of peer review by a small cabal of scientists, whom they accuse of using their position to slow down the publication of the findings of their competitors. Then there is the scandal surrounding the leaked emails of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in England, and the dubious data published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which further exposes a worrying trend towards the corruption of peer review. Peer review is a system that subjects scientific and scholarly work to the scrutiny of other experts in the field. Ideally it ensures that research is only approved or published when it meets the standards of scientific rigour and its findings are sound. At its best, peer review guarantees that it is disinterested science which informs public discussion and debate. When established through peer review, the authority of science helps to clarify disputes and injects into public discussion the latest findings and research. Peer reviewing depends on a community of experts who are competent and committed to impartiality. It depends on the commitment and collaboration of scientists and scholars in a given field. However, the individuals who constitute a ‘community of experts’ also tend to be preoccupied with their own personal position and status. Often, the colleagues they are reviewing and refereeing are their competitors and sometimes even their bitter rivals. The contradiction between working as a member of an expert community and one’s own personal interests cannot always be satisfactorily resolved. Unfortunately, even with the best will in the world, peer reviewing is rarely an entirely disinterested process. All too often the system of peer review is infused with vested interests. As many of my colleagues in academia know, peer reviewing is frequently carried out through a kind of mates’ club, between friends and acquaintances, and all too often the question of who gets published and who gets rejected is determined by who you know and where you stand in a particular academic debate. Peer reviewing cannot remain immune to the preoccupations, agenda and interests of the individuals who carry it out. Even when they have the best intentions, academics and scientists can overlook errors and become blind to the importance of a new but maverick contribution. They are ordinary mortals who have their fair share of prejudices, and are often no less petty or self-centred than other people can sometimes be. Nevertheless, peer reviewing has traditionally, at least, been the most effective way of exercising quality control over the proposals and output of the scholarly and scientific communities. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8227/.

"Where's Your Argument? Informal Logic, Critical Thinking and Argumentation," Manchester Metropolitan University, April 12-13, 2010.

DAY ONE: issues in the study of Informal Logic and Argumentation

• what is the difference between a good argument and a bad argument?; what's the difference between rhetoric and argument?; is there a difference between legitimate persuasion and propaganda?
• an opportunity to participate in discussion with some of the leading authors writing on these crucial questions.

DAY TWO: the role of argument and rhetoric in policy and politics

• do you have a right to your own opinion?; is the Spin Doctor's art a noble one?
• an opportunity to inoculate yourself against political rhetoric, in time for the General Election!

Speakers:

• Frans van Eemeren, "The Pragma-Dialectical Approach to Argument"
• Lars Hertzberg, "The Grammar of Inference"
• Don S. Levi, "The Informality of Logic"
• Michael Loughlin, "The 'Evidence Based Medicine' Debate"
• Steven Poole, "Unspeak"
• John Powell, "Criteria for Good Argument"
• Rupert Read, "'Reframing' and 'Unspeak' or Politics Without Propaganda?"
• Jamie Whyte, "Bad Thoughts and Worse Policies"

Visit the conference website here: http://www.cheshire.mmu.ac.uk/ids/home/news/whereisyourargument.php.

Wolfe, Alan. "In Defence of a Common Culture." CHRISTIANITY TODAY February 4, 2010.

Hirsch, E. D. The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. E.D. Hirsch is a great American, a scholar who cares deeply about the youth of this country, what they are taught, and how likely they are to become engaged and thoughtful citizens. Hirsch describes himself as having enjoyed a "comfortable life as a conference-going literary theorist" before realizing that the failure of American schools to offer students actual content rather than faddish pedagogical innovations was not only turning young people into cultural illiterates but also was preventing those at the bottom of the ladder from improving their prospects in life through education. The founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation and the author of the controversial Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987), Hirsch was adopted by the Right early in the culture wars. But his actual political sympathies are more in line with Albert Shanker, the longterm leader of the New York City teacher's union (to whose memory the present book is dedicated). Hirsch's new book is called The Making of Americans, and while he describes it as both departing from and building upon his previous work, it does more of the latter than the former. Disappointingly there is little new to be learned; anyone who has already read Diane Ravich's Left Back will not glean more history and, indeed, anyone who has read Hirsch's previous books will pretty much know the contours of the argument. Still this book is valuable because it offers a clearly written, highly accessible, and brief statement of the issues that have guided Hirsch for the past two or three decades. Reading William Bennett from the Right or almost any product of a major school of education from the Left, one could be forgiven for thinking that the American school wars were a battle between progressive educators seeking to teach students about the wonders of race, ethnicity, and gender on the one hand and old-fashioned disciplinarians worried about the seductions of relativism and hedonism on the other. The most important contribution Hirsch makes to the way we think about educating our youth is to get us out of using terms such as Left and Right. All wars eventually end, even culture wars. It is time to take the ideology out of our educational battles, a task for which E.D. Hirsch is particularly suited. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.christianitytoday.com/global/printer.html?/bc/2010/janfeb/defensecommonculture.html.

Cohen, Patricia. "Descartes Letter Found, Therefore It Is." NEW YORK TIMES February 24, 2010.

It was the Great Train Robbery of French intellectual life: thousands of treasured documents that vanished from the Institut de France in the mid-1800s, stolen by an Italian mathematician. Among them were 72 letters by René Descartes, the founding genius of modern philosophy and analytic geometry. Now one of those purloined letters has turned up at a small private college in eastern Pennsylvania, providing scholars with another keyhole into one of the Western world’s greatest minds. The letter, dated May 27, 1641, concerns the publication of Meditations on First Philosophy, a celebrated work whose use of reason and scientific methods helped to ignite a revolution in thought. The document, experts say, reveals just how much Descartes tailored his writings to answer his contemporary critics. Frequently suspected of heresy, Descartes sent copies of his arguments to well-known theologians to gauge their opinions and answer their objections within his text. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/books/25descartes.html.

Grafton, Anthony. "Britain: the Disgrace of the Universities." NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS BLOG March 9, 2010.

British universities face a crisis of the mind and spirit. For thirty years, Tory and Labour politicians, bureaucrats, and “managers” have hacked at the traditional foundations of academic life. Unless policies and practices change soon, the damage will be impossible to remedy. As an “Occasional Student” at University College London in the early 1970s and a regular visitor to the Warburg Institute, Oxford, and Cambridge after that, I—like many American humanists—envied colleagues who taught at British universities. We had offices with linoleum; they had rooms with carpets. We worked at desks; they sat with their students on comfy chairs and gave them glasses of sherry. Above all, we felt under constant pressure to do the newest new thing, and show the world that we were doing it: to be endlessly innovative and interdisciplinary and industrious. British humanists innovated too. Edward Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, Frances Yates and Peter Burke, and many others formulated new ways of looking at history for my generation. But British academics always admitted, as we sometimes did not, that it is vital to preserve and update our traditional disciplines and forms of knowledge: languages, precise interpretation of texts and images and objects, rigorous philosophical analysis and argument. Otherwise all the sexy interdisciplinary work will yield only a trickle of trendy blather. There was a Slow Food feel to British university life, based on a consensus that people should take the time to make an article or a book as dense and rich as it could be. Good American universities were never exactly Fast Food Nation, but we certainly felt the pressure to produce, regularly and rapidly. . . . Read the rest here: http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/437005501/britain-the-disgrace-of-the-universities.

Ruse, Michael. "Philosophers Rip Darwin." CHRONICLE REVIEW March 7, 2010.

Fodor, Jerry A., and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. What Darwin Got Wrong. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009.

Last year was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The anniversary was marked by conferences the world over. I will not tell you how many I attended; ecologically sensitive readers of The Chronicle might start whining about carbon footprints and that sort of thing. Let me just say that I found myself going no fewer than three times through the Quad City International Airport, in Moline, Ill. Moline! I mention this as background to the publication of a new book by Jerry A. Fodor, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a professor of cognitive science at the University of Arizona. The title of the book, What Darwin Got Wrong (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), tells you their opinion of the old English naturalist and of his theory of evolution through natural selection. If Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini were an isolated case, one could dismiss their book with a grimace (if you were a biologist), or welcome them with a cheer (if you were a creationist). But in the philosophical community, there is an increasingly vocal cadre of eminent philosophers harboring doubts about Darwin. To understand their critique, we must first put the clock back a year, to the beginning of the celebrations. . . .

Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/What-Darwins-Doubters-Get/64457/.

Dirda, Michael. "The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist." BarnesandNobleReview.Com February 5, 2010.

Kleist, Heinrich von.

• Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist. Trans. Peter Wortsman. Archipelago, 2009.
• Selected Writings of Heinrich von Kleist. Ed. and trans. David Constantine. Indianopolis: Hackett, 2004.
• The Marquise of O and Other Stories. Trans. David Luke and Nigel Reeves. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.

Kleist's ironies are . . . what make his fiction so appealing to modern sensibilities. By contrast, the writer's attractively doomed and abbreviated life is nothing if not Romantic. The scion of an old Prussian military family, Kleist was by all accounts nervous and maladroit in society, hypochondriacal, a restless traveler, deeply ambitious (he hoped to unseat Goethe as the leading German author), and, ultimately, a suicide at 34. Reading Kant, he explained, had undermined his faith in Enlightenment reason, and most of his life was as unsettled as the Napoleonic era he lived through. Thus, while Kleist writes with surprising frankness about the darker reaches of eros, his own sexuality remains enigmatic. Before breaking off his engagement to a suitable young woman, his letters allude to some kind of mysterious impairment to happiness; later he flirts seriously with a cousin old enough to be his mother. Even more seriously, he seems to have suggested double-suicide to more than one female acquaintance -- and eventually found in the cancer-ridden Henriette Vogel the partner he was looking for. He shot her, then himself. . . .

Read the rest here: http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Library-Without-Walls/The-Stories-of-Heinrich-von-Kleist/ba-p/2158.

Bole, William. "Table Talk: a Celebrated Thinker has Friends to Dinner." BOSTON COLLEGE MAGAZINE (Winter 2010).

Richardson, W. J. Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963. Some years back there circulated an urban legend surrounding a Jesuit philosophy professor named William Richardson. The story went that Richardson, a student at the time, was defending his doctoral dissertation on Martin Heidegger—one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th century—and the young Jesuit was being challenged on essential points of his Heideggerian interpretation, when a man stood up in the back of the lecture room and said simply, “I think he’s right.” And that man was Heidegger. . . . Bill Richardson’s philosophical life is as storied as it has been abundant, with legends made and, one Thursday evening in October, remade. That night, he welcomed three philosopher friends to St. Mary’s for a conversation over dinner that was an intimate affair except for the cameras, lights, tripods, and microphones wired to each of the four participants. There to capture the dialogue was a video crew hired by another three philosophers, young academics who studied with Richardson at Boston College and are producing a documentary about the man and the theorist. The three eminent guests who found their way to the small dining room in a corner of the Jesuit residence were Boston College philosophy professors Jeffrey Bloechl and Richard Kearney, together with Thomas Sheehan, who teaches at Stanford University. In an interview later on, Sheehan said of Richardson, “He was the one who established the paradigm that we still follow to this day for understanding Heidegger.” . . . Read the rest here: http://bcm.bc.edu/issues/winter_2010/linden_lane/table-talk.html.

Dunbar, Max. "The Intense Humming of Evil." 3AM MAGAZINE February 7, 2010.

Faye, Emmanuel. Heidegger: the Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. When the Nazis achieved power in 1933 they were not satisfied with mere control of the state. Fascist ideology spread through the fields of law, medicine and culture as a totalising virus. The universities were no exception. The campus was subject to the purge or worse of dissent, the narrowing of curricula and the book-burning ceremonies that still resonate as a symbol of anti-intellectualism in its worst and truest form. Writers and thinkers still alive after the fall of the regime were confronted with that ultimate question: what did you do in the war? Academic supporters of Nazism could see several ways to postwar respectability. They could plead indulgence. It must have be easy in the mid-thirties to get caught up in the propaganda whirl of it all: tomorrow belongs to me! Alternatively, one could plead cowardice or pragmatism. Many had to make compromises to spare themselves and to protect family and friends. The mistake is to see fascism as strictly a yob phenomenon that addresses the short-term frustrations of the poor and ignorant. The mistake is to believe that it cannot possibly appeal to educated men and women. Yet even before Hitler’s takeover there were true believers inside the academy’s lustrous gates. No one now remembers Schmitt, Wolf and Rosenberg but Martin Heidegger continues to be read, studied and quoted. And yet, as Emmanuel Faye shows in his devastating study, the rector of Freiburg held a fervent and unblinking commitment to Nazism. He was the writer at the book burnings. He raised not a word of protest when a government decree dismissed his former teacher and assistant; he had complained that the universities had been ‘Jewified’ under Weimar, and organised his study sessions as outdoor ‘work camps’ in a creepy homage to the horror that was coming. Heidegger rejected the abstract pursuits of art and humanities. Authentic existence could only be experienced through confict and struggle; the lectures fairly drip with blood and soil. He justified racial selection, eugenics and dictatorship. Reading Faye’s book, I had two thoughts going through my mind. How the fuck did he get away with this? And: Why did anyone take this guy seriously? It’s not the case that a romance with totalitarianism corrupted Heidegger’s philosophy. Heidegger’s philosophy was structured around his support for Nazism. There was nothing else. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-intense-humming-of-evil/.

Horowitz, Irving Louis. "Assaulting Arendt." FIRST THINGS (February 2010).

The honorable tradition of criticism carries with it a displeasing aspect. This is especially the case in the higher academic circles. Reputations are too frequently made when pygmies stand on the shoulders of giants and when iconic and sometimes heroic figures are symbolically cut down to size. The theory is that, if the critic saws off the legs of those who have managed to stand tall for generations, the midgets can win handily in face-to-face combat with the dead. This is not to deny that even the most talented are sometimes in error; criticism is a useful art. It is, however, a derivative art. Criticism finds acceptance in a culture that measures success by small errors rather than by large-scale successes. The recent critique of Hannah Arendt is a case in point. The most comprehensive assault to date, some thirty-five years after her death, is also the most recent. Bernard Wasserstein, professor of modern European Jewish history at the University of Chicago, comments on Arendt in the Times Literary Supplement in October 2009 under the title “Blame the Victim: Hannah Arendt Among the Nazis.” He offers not just a selective summary of “the historian and her sources” but also an umbrella of charges and allegations from other prominent figures over the past half century. One of the most infamous is that of my good friend Walter Laqueur—a significant figure in his own right. Wasserstein spares us the need to pick through the emotive rubble that has plagued Arendt’s career, stitching together a picture of her as either a gullible reader of neo-Nazi literature or a closet Jewish anti-Semite in need of intellectual detoxification. In summary, but not in any way an exaggeration, Wasserstein claims the following: • The success of Arendt’s earlier work is owed more to the way it locked on to mid-twentieth-century Western guilt over imperialism and the continued strengthening of the Cold War than to The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt’s conception of the dynamics of historical change is little more than a confused mishmash of the structural, the social-psychological, and the conspiratorial. • Her works display a deep ignorance of political economy, diplomacy, and military strategy. Furthermore, she had little grasp or even interest in the mechanics of the political process in the states about which she wrote. • Rather than examine hard evidence, she deals in trifles and inflates them into richly colored balloons of generalization. At a time when superior historians were rejecting and becoming disenchanted by the idea of totalitarianism, her work in this area did not explain the generalization. • Her comparisons of Nazism and communism were sporadic and uneven, and she hardly dealt with Italian fascism as predecessor of these test cases of totalitarianism. The concept was incorporated into the vernacular of the 1960s and 1970s only because it served the useful ideological purposes of the Cold Warriors at the time. • The burden of her later work is blaming Jewish victims rather than anti-Semitic perpetrators. In her inversion of victims and victimizers, her bile knew no ethnic boundaries or rationalizations. • There was always a special edge to her criticism of her own Jewish people. She swallowed sometimes in whole cloth the poisonous anti-Semitism hatched in the Weimar period, much of which was shrouded in the Nazi literature of the age. The ferocity of his critique blinds Wasserstein to several uncomfortable facts. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/01/assaulting-arendt.

21st International Congress of Historical Sciences, University of Amsterdam, August 22-28, 2010.

The next congress of the International Committee of Historical Sciences (ICHS) will be jointly organized by four organizations:

• the Netherlands National Committee: Koninklijk Nederlands Historisch Genootschap (KNHG)
• Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA)
• Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB)
• International Institute of Social History (IISH).

The International Congress of Historical Sciences takes place every five years. This Congress provides an ideal venue for extensive reports, papers, debates, exchanges, and meetings reflecting historical research in action. It is the meeting place for the global community of historians. In recent years the Congress has been held in Madrid (1990), Montreal (1995), Oslo (2000), and Sydney (2005). Visit the conference website here: http://www.ichs2010.org/.

"Ten Rules for Writing Fiction." GUARDIAN February 20, 2010.

Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don'ts. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one.

Alpaugh, David. "The New Math of Poetry." CHRONICLE REVIEW February 21, 2010.

It's hard to figure out how much poetry is being published in America. When I suggested to Michael Neff, founder of Web del Sol, that anyone can start an online journal for $100, he pointed out that anyone can start one via a blog for nothing. If current trends persist, the sheer amount of poetry "published" is likely to double, quadruple, "ten-tuple" in the decades ahead. Who is writing all this poetry? In quieter times, the art's only significant promoters were English professors who focused on reading poetry for its own sake. Today colleges across America have hundreds of programs devoted to teaching men and women how to actually write the stuff. Those in charge of undergraduate and M.F.A. programs have cast themselves in the role of poetry-writing cheerleaders who are busy assuring tens of thousands of students that they are talented poets who should expect their work not only to be published but to win awards as well. The notion that writing and performing "poetry" is the easiest way to satisfy the American itch for 15 minutes of fame has spilled out of our campuses and into the wider culture. You can't pick up a violin or oboe for the first time on Monday morning and expect to play at Lincoln Center that weekend, but you can write your first poem in May and appear at an open mike in June waving a "chapbook" for sale. The new math of poetry is driven not by reader demand for great or even good poetry but by the demand of myriads of aspiring poets to experience the thrill of "publication." The new math is stunning. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Math-of-Poetry/64249/.

Pub: Terry Eagleton, THE TASK OF THE CRITIC.

Eagleton, Terry, and Matthew Beaumont. The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue. London: Verso, 2010. The Task of the Critic is a comprehensive volume of interviews, covering both Terry Eagleton's life and the development of his thought and politics. Erudite and anecdotal, Matthew Beaumont's - Senior Lecturer in English at UCL - keen questions track the course of Britain's most esteemed and formidable literary theorist. Chapters cover his childhood in Salford to his undergraduate years and early academic life, as well as his developing ideas on subjects as diverse as Politics and Aesthetics; New Left and the Church; Marxism and Feminism; Death and Love. Lively and insightful, this collection will appeal not only to those with an interest in Eagleton himself, but to all those interested in the evolution of radical politics, modernism, cultural theory, the history of ideas, sociology, semantic inquiry and the state of Marxist theory. His outspoken views on everything from the Establishment: Oxbridge is "full of people who were there largely because they could not conceivably be anywhere else, as some people can only be in top-security psychiatric institutions", to the Monarchy, which reportedly prompted Prince Charles to call him "that dreadful Terry Eagleton" are discussed, expanded and explained in context. For further information, visit: http://www.versobooks.com/books/cdef/ef-titles/eagleton_task_of_the_critic.shtml.

Pub: Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Gregory Elliot, A MARXIST PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, and Gregory Elliot. A Marxist Philosophy of Language. Chicago: Haymarket, 2009. The purpose of this book is to give a precise meaning to the formula: English is the language of imperialism. Understanding that statement involves a critique of the dominant views of language, both in the field of linguistics (the book has a chapter criticising Chomsky’s research programme) and of the philosophy of language (the book has a chapter assessing Habermas’s philosophy of communicative action). 
The book aims at constructing a Marxist philosophy of language, embodying a view of language as a social, historical, material and political phenomenon. Since there has never been a strong tradition of thinking about language in Marxism, the book provides an overview of the question of Marxism in language (from Stalin’s pamphlet to Voloshinov's book, taking in an essay by Pasolini), and it seeks to construct a number of concepts for a Marxist philosophy of language. 
The book belongs to the tradition of Marxist critique of dominant ideologies. It should be particularly useful to those who, in the fields of language study, literature and communication studies, have decided that language is not merely an instrument of communication. Further information is here: http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/A-Marxist-Philosophy-of-Language.

Cfp: "Rhetoric in Society III," Department of Applied Language Studies, Lessius University College, Antwerpen, Belgium, January 26-28, 2011.

Keynote Speakers: Gunther Kress Christopher W. Tindale Jef Verschueren Rethinking Rhetoric: Since Aristotle, the study of rhetoric has focused on the persuasive aspect of discourse in the political, forensic, and ceremonial domains. Rhetoric deals with doxa, the shared opinions and reasons people consider plausible and acceptable in a specific situation. It involves decisions taken by participants in public discourse on the basis of common deliberation and free choice in domains in which there can be no absolute truth, e.g. as in social and political life. Nowadays, we have come to realize the importance of rhetoric in all forms of discourse. There is no communication without some form of rhetoric. Rhetoricians examine how people use arguments and language in order to convince or persuade an audience. But there is a lot more to rhetoric than that. It comprises more than sets of advice; in fact it is an art. It is the art of discovering what is persuasive in a given situation. This inventiveness points to how rhetoric has a heuristic function as well. It appeals to our creativity in our search for relevant questions and answers to specific matters. And as our discourse and arguments develop in interaction with other discourses (Voloshinov / Bakhtin), the hermeneutic aspect of rhetoric should not be overlooked. There is no rhetoric without analysis, interpretation and theoretical reflection. The art of speaking and writing “well” can be considered a cornerstone of our cultures and our educational systems. Interdisciplinary Research: The conference Rhetoric in Society aims to present and discuss different approaches to rhetoric. It will address this basic question: in what ways can the study of rhetoric function and provide an insight into our postmodern world? Consequently, what can it claim about discourse in the public domain, how is it related to empirical sciences, what can it say about the ever increasing amount of information and opinion that pervades our lives? Conversely, it can also be asked in what way actual language and communication theories and disciplines draw on ancient rhetoric. Contributions to the conference will cover a wide range of both themes and theories. They will cover a broad spectrum of academic fields and thus favour interdisciplinary research not only within the fields of rhetoric, rhetorical criticism, rhetorical citizenship, argumentation studies, pragmatics, critical discourse studies, text linguistics, art and literature, but also the fields of communication studies, journalism studies, political, social and educational studies, history and philosophy. We welcome papers or panel proposals on the role of rhetoric and argumentation in written and oral discourse and genres, on topics such as: public deliberation, controversies, legal decision-making, spin, hyphenated writing, social change, political campaigning, social movements, public relations, publicity, advertising, management, corporate internal communication, art and literature, visual rhetoric and public media discourse. The core themes of the conference are: Rhetoric in journalism and new media Rhetoric in political discourse Rhetoric in organizational discourse Rhetoric in legal discourse Rhetoric in education Rhetoric in visual communication Theoretical, historical and (inter)cultural perspectives on rhetoric Visit the conference website here: http://www.lessius.eu/tt/ris/.

Doherty, Thomas. "The Death of Film Criticism." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION February 28, 2010.

"It sucks," decrees an Internet movie critic, sharing the most common aesthetic reaction in contemporary film criticism. In the viral salon of bloggers and chat-roomers, the finely tuned turns of phrase crafted by an earlier generation of sharp-eyed cinema scribes have been winnowed to a curt kiss-off. In cyberspace everyone can hear you scream. Just log on, vent, and hit send. The transfer of film criticism from its print-based platforms (newspapers, magazines, and academic journals) to ectoplasmic Web-page billboards has rocked the lit-crit screen trade. Whether from the world of journalism (where the pink slips are landing with hurricane force) or academe (which itself is experiencing the worst job market since the Middle Ages), serious writers on film feel under siege, underappreciated, and underemployed. The ballast of traditional credentials—whereby film critics earned their bones through university degrees or years at metropolitan dailies—has been thrown overboard by the judgment calls of anonymous upstarts without portfolio but very much with a DSL hotline to Hollywood's prime moviegoing demographic. In film criticism, the blogosphere is the true sphere of influence. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Death-of-Film-Criticism/64352/.

Harley, Diane, et al. ASSESSING THE FUTURE LANDSCAPE OF SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION. UC, Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education, 2010.

The authors argue that the continued dominance of traditional modes of publication, such as the peer-reviewed journal article and the university press monograph, may force scholars to ignore the "'opportunities' afforded by new technologies, including those falling into the Web 2.0 category." Read the rest by downloading the whole document here: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0kr8s78v.

Menand, Louis. "The PHD Problem." HARVARD MAGAZINE (November-December 2009).

Menand, Louis. The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. New York: Norton, 2010. Bass professor of English Louis Menand is a literary critic and intellectual and cultural historian—author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Metaphysical Club and a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He is also a scholar of his discipline (he co-edited the modernism volume in the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism) and of the very notion of the academy itself (Menand edited The Future of Academic Freedom, 1997). His new book, The Marketplace of Ideas, to be published in December by W.W. Norton, is informed in part by his recent service as faculty co-leader in the development of Harvard College’s new General Education curriculum, introduced this fall (the book is dedicated to his colleagues in that protracted task). In this work, Menand examines general education, the state of the humanities, the tensions between disciplinary and interdisciplinary work, and, in chapter four, “Why Do Professors All Think Alike?” The following excerpts, from the third and fourth chapters and his conclusion, probe the professionalization of a research-oriented professoriate and the practice and consequences of contemporary doctoral education, and the resulting implications for liberal-arts colleges, universities, and the wider society. . . . Read the rest here: http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/11/professionalization-in-academy. See also:

• "Author Menand on Reforming American Universities." National Public Radio January 18, 2010 (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122702647);
• Lewis-Kraus, Gideon. "The Opening of the Academic Mind: How to Rescue the Professoriate from Professionalisation." Slate January 17, 2010 (http://www.slate.com/id/2241555/);
• McClay, Wilfred M. "The Conundrum on Campus." Wall Street Journal January 14, 2010 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704281204575003251630833606.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion).